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Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity PDF

200 Pages·2007·1.15 MB·English
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K i n d r e d SPECTERS This page intentionally left blank K i n d r e d S P E C T E R S Death, Mourning, and American Affinity i Christopher Peterson University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London Chapter 2 was previously published in Modern Fiction Studies52, no. 3 (fall 2006): 548–69; copyright 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press; reprinted with permission from The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 3 was previously published in CR: The New Centennial Review4, no. 1 (2004): 227–265; reprinted with permission from Michigan State University Press. Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peterson, Christopher, 1972– Kindred specters : death, mourning, and American affinity / Christopher Peterson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN:978-0-8166-4983-9 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-4983-9 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN:978-0-8166-4984-6 (pb : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8166-4984-7 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Death in literature. 2. Mourning customs in literature. 3. Kinship in literature. I. Title. PN56.D4P47 2007 810.9'3548—dc22 2007014351 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 i On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. —Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio This page intentionally left blank C o n t e n t s Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Giving Up the Geist 37 2. Beloved’s Claim 68 3. The Haunted House of Kinship 97 4. The Kinship of Strangers; or, Beyond Affiliation 135 Notes 157 Index 183 i This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments For an author who seeks to question the epistemological assumption that allows us to distinguish kin from non-kin, to thank those kin who contributed to the book’s completion is problematic, to say the least. What does it mean to acknowledge one’s kin in the context of an argu- ment that aims to show how knowledge of others is irremediably com- promised by their alterity? How would I know whom to thank? How does recognizing one’s collaborators necessarily entail the omission of innumerable others that memory fails to capture? In what follows, I aim to express my gratitude to all those who were kind enough to indulge my turning the conversation to thoughts of ghosts and kinship during the years that I spent researching and writing. If, as I argue in the pages that follow, kinship is always implicated in a violent reduction of the other to the same (kind), I hope that the following acknowledgments commit only the least amount of violence that kinship requires. This project was generously supported by grants from the Ah- manson Foundation, the Marta Feuchtwanger Trust, and the Josephine De Kármán Fellowship Trust. My parents, John Peterson and Linda Hoffman-Peterson, as well as my siblings, Ann Peterson-Miller, Eliza- beth Peterson, and Geoffrey Peterson, all showed much more than the usual amount of interest and support that “blood” relationships are said to require. Numerous friends were also invaluable to my work as well as to my sanity. In particular, I thank Matthew Adler, Bradley Youngston, Cindy Sarver, Christine Coffman, Peter Huk, Mark Hud- son, Vinay Swamy, Gary Riley, Diana Anders, Luis Williams, Michelle Peterson, Randy Colvin, Eric Anders, and Robert Byer. I also want to thank those faculty at Northwestern University who inspired me as an undergraduate to pursue the study of literature: Michal Ginsburg, Françoise Lionnet, Jane Winston, and Helen Deustch. ix i

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The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters, Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently
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